About Buffalo Courier-Express

Buffalo Courier-Express

The Buffalo Courier-Express was a morning broadsheet newspaper published in Buffalo, New York, from 1926 until September 19, 1982. It was created by merging two older Buffalo dailies, the Buffalo Courier and the Buffalo Morning Express, and through those predecessors it claimed a heritage reaching back to 1828. For fifty-six years it served as one of Buffalo's two daily newspapers, competing with the afternoon Buffalo Evening News, and its disappearance in 1982 left Buffalo with a single daily newspaper for the first time in generations.

The paper was a morning institution in a Great Lakes port and manufacturing city that had grown up around the Erie Canal and the lake trade. Its pages recorded Buffalo's industrial rise, its hard winters, its politics, and its sports, and its reporters built one of the largest newspaper reference libraries in western New York. When the paper closed, that library survived as an archive, even though the newspaper itself did not.

Formation in the 1926 Merger

The Courier-Express was born on June 14, 1926, when the Buffalo Courier and the Buffalo Morning Express were combined, initially under the combined title Buffalo Courier and Buffalo Morning Express, a name that was soon shortened to Buffalo Courier-Express. William J. Conners, the owner of the Courier, was the figure instrumental in bringing the two papers together. At the creation of the combined newspaper, Conners served as chairman, his son William J. Conners Jr. served as publisher and president, and Burrows Matthews became editor.

The merger was part of a wider consolidation of Buffalo journalism. Another Conners property, the Buffalo Daily Star and the Enquirer, which had succeeded the Buffalo Enquirer, published its final issue only days later, on June 19, 1926. Buffalo, like most American cities of its size, had once supported a crowded field of competing dailies, and the 1920s steadily reduced that field to a small number of survivors. The Courier-Express emerged from that process as the city's morning voice.

The Courier Line of Ancestry

One half of the merged paper traced its descent through the Buffalo Daily Courier, a title published in the nineteenth century before the paper continued as the Buffalo Courier and absorbed the Buffalo Record. Conners acquired the Courier in 1897 and combined it with the Record, at first publishing the result as the Courier-Record before shortening the name to Buffalo Courier. The daily Courier had been a strong force in Buffalo journalism throughout the late nineteenth century, and it had begun a Sunday edition in 1875.

Conners himself was a formidable Buffalo character. A product of the city's First Ward, he had left school at thirteen, gone to work on the docks, and built a fortune in the boisterous commercial world of Great Lakes shipping before plunging into the newspaper business through a series of acquisitions that culminated in his purchase of the Courier. His toughness became part of the paper's identity, and the Conners family retained ownership of the Courier-Express from its founding in 1926 until 1979.

The Express Line and Mark Twain

The Morning Express, the other partner in the merger, had been established in 1846 by the printer Almon Clapp. Its most famous association came in 1869, when Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, acquired a part-ownership interest in the Buffalo Express and became its co-editor, working alongside Josephus Nelson Larned. Twain's tenure at the paper lasted from 1869 to 1871, and the Express operated from a building on East Swan Street during his time there.

Twain had signed the contract to become the paper's co-owner and managing editor in August 1869. In February 1870 he married Olivia Langdon of Elmira, and the couple lived in Buffalo, in a house on Delaware Avenue provided by his father-in-law. His Buffalo years were marked by personal tragedy, including the grave illness of his wife and the frailty of his infant son, and Twain grew tired of the daily journalism grind. In March 1871 he sold his share of the Express, at a loss, and left Buffalo. He went on to write his most celebrated novels elsewhere, but Buffalo State and local historians later treated his Express editorship as a significant chapter in the city's literary history, and the Express issues from his tenure were digitized so that readers could search them by keyword.

Editorial Character and Home in Downtown Buffalo

In its political character, the Courier and then the Courier-Express took a liberal position on issues, a stance that distinguished it in Buffalo's newspaper market. The paper chronicled the daily life of the city through the Depression, the Second World War, and the postwar decades, when Buffalo's steel mills, grain elevators, and rail yards still employed tens of thousands of people.

In 1930, four years after the merger, the Courier-Express opened an impressive headquarters building at Main and Goodell streets in downtown Buffalo. The building was granted landmark status by the city's Landmark and Preservation Board in 1978, near the end of the paper's life, and it survived the newspaper itself, later serving other institutional uses in the city center. The building stood as a physical reminder of an era when a city's morning newspaper was one of its central institutions, with its presses, newsroom, and business offices gathered under one prominent roof.

Editors and Notable Staff

Burrows Matthews, who had edited the Buffalo Express in its final independent years, led the Courier-Express as editor from 1926 until 1955, giving the merged paper three decades of editorial continuity. He was succeeded by Cy B. King, who served from 1956 to 1970, and then by Douglas L. Turner, editor from 1971 to 1980. Joel R. Kramer was the paper's last editor, serving from 1981 until the closure in 1982.

The paper's staff and contributors included figures whose work outlived it. Wilbur Porterfield, a photographic pictorialist, was associated with the paper from 1926 to 1958. The editorial cartoonist Tom Toles was among its notable alumni; his later work in Buffalo and Washington earned national recognition. Generations of Buffalo reporters passed through the Courier-Express newsroom, and their collective memory of the city was preserved in the newspaper's own reference files.

Sale to Cowles Media

In August 1979, the Conners era ended when the Courier-Express was purchased by the Cowles Media Company, a publishing company based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The sale placed a locally rooted paper inside an out-of-state chain at a moment when the American newspaper industry was consolidating and afternoon and second newspapers in many cities were weakening.

After a change in corporate leadership, Cowles Media decided to close the paper in September 1982. A possible rescue took shape in the form of a deal to sell the Courier-Express to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, but members of the local Newspaper Guild voted to oppose that deal. With no sale completed, the paper's fate was sealed, and its staff prepared a final edition even as the institution they worked for was ending around them.

The Final Edition of September 19, 1982

The September 19, 1982 issue was the last issue of the Buffalo Courier-Express. A reporter assigned on the final working day to write a quick history of the newspaper for that last edition saw the piece go unpublished at the time; it was finally printed in the rival Buffalo News twenty-five years later, in 2007, on the anniversary of the closing. The episode captured something of the abruptness of the end: a paper that had chronicled Buffalo for generations did not get to publish its own farewell history.

The closure left Buffalo with only one daily newspaper, the Buffalo Evening News, which later became The Buffalo News. Buffalo joined the growing list of American cities in which a single ownership controlled daily print journalism, and former Courier-Express readers and advertisers had to migrate to the surviving paper or go without a morning daily altogether.

The Newspaper Library and Archive

Cowles Media donated the Courier-Express library to the Buffalo History Museum and Buffalo State College, and the collection came to be housed in the E. H. Butler Library at Buffalo State. The library consisted of approximately one million news clippings and about 100,000 photographs, together with artworks and framed photographs. The clippings and photographs, arranged by subject and person, covered the period from the late 1950s through September 19, 1982, and they had served as the working reference library for the paper's reporters.

The collection had limits that reflected its working origins: the paper's librarians had weeded the clipping and photographic files routinely, discarding older material, so many earlier subject areas were not covered. Even so, the archive became one of the most heavily used special collections at Buffalo State, attracting scholars from around the world and receiving, on average, more than a hundred research requests a year. Digitization proceeded gradually, with photographs added over time to an online archive presence, and the Mark Twain-era Express issues were digitized as well through a grant-supported project.

Legacy

The Buffalo Courier-Express was remembered as the product of Buffalo's great age of competing dailies and as a casualty of the consolidation that ended that age. Its lineage ran from the anti-slavery-era and canal-era press of the nineteenth century, through Mark Twain's brief and unhappy editorship of the Express, through the Conners family's half-century of ownership, to its final years under a distant corporate owner. Its building survived as a downtown landmark, its photographic and clipping archive survived as a research treasure, and its former rival survived as the city's only daily. The paper itself, however, ended on a Sunday in September 1982, closing a chapter of Buffalo journalism that had begun, through its ancestors, more than a century and a half earlier.